Monday, February 28, 2011

"Gold is likely to move to record highs if trouble continues," said Adrian Ash, head of research at Bullion Vault, which holds more than $1bn(£621m) of gold for clients. At $1,405, the price is already closing in on its all-time high of $1,423.75, hit on December 6 last year. Gold's incredible At $1,405, the price is already closing in on its all-time high of $1,423.75, hit on December 6 last year. "Gold is a form of crisis insurance, one that just keeps paying," Mr Ash said. "If you bought when Northern Rock started to crumble you would have doubled your money by now. It has kept paying out as crisis nsurance for the past four years." nsurance for the past four years." How to invest in g Indeed, the last big gold spike shares some similarities with the situation in which the world finds itself now."There are interesting historical comparisons with 1980 when tanks were going into Afghanistan and there was weak leadership in the US," said Mr Ash

In an interview today on the Al Arabyia news network, an informed source within the Revolutionary Guards Corps revealed that Iran has several military bases in Libya. The source, who requested anonymity due to his sensitive position within the Guards, elaborated further that the Iranian military bases are located mostly along Libya’s borders with the African countries of Chad and Niger. From there, he said, the Guards actively smuggle arms and supply logistical assistance to rebellious groups in the African countries. According to this source, Guards enter Libya under the guise of oil company employees. Most of these companies are under the control of the Revolutionary Guards. The source, who is a colonel in the Guards, added that Gaddafi and his government are quite aware of these activities and have even signed joint contracts with those Iranian oil companies so that the the Guards can enter Libya without any trouble. The colonel stated that with the current unrest in Libya, over 500 Guards have been unable to evacuate and are under orders to destroy all documents

Sunday, February 27, 2011

In a recent interview, United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out his view of the nature of world economic growth and the role of the US financial sector. It is a deeply disturbing vision, one that amounts to a huge, uninformed gamble with the future of the American economy – and that suggests that Geithner remains the senior public official worldwide who is most in thrall to the self-serving ideology of big banks Geithner argues that the world will now experience a major “financial deepening,” owing to growing demand in emerging markets for financial products and services. He is thinking, of course, of “middle-income” countries like India, China, and Brazil. And he is right to emphasize that all have made terrific progress and now offer great opportunities for the rising middle class, which wants to accumulate savings, borrow more easily (for productive investment, home purchases, education, etc), and, more generally, smooth out consumption. etc), and, more generally, smooth out consumption. But then Geithner takes a leap. He wants US banks to take the lead in these countries’ financia development. His words are worth quoting at length:“I don’t have any enthusiasm for…trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world…It’s the same thing for Microsoft or anything else. We want US firms to benefit from that…Now, financial firms are different because of the risk, but you can contain that through regulation.” regulation.” There are three serious problems with this view. First, Geithner ignores everything that we know about the pattern of financial development around the world. It is very rare for financial systems to develop without major crises. In fact, experience in recent decades confirms what should have develop without major crises. In fact, experience in recent decades confirms what should have been obvious from previous centuries: as countries grow and accumulate savings, they become increasingly prone to financial collapse. Given Geithner’s extensive international crisis-fighting experience at the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and the New York Federal Reserve, his current naiveté on this point is simply stunning. experience at the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and the New York Federa Reserve, his current naiveté on this point is simply stunning.

The spike in the oil price to nearly $120 a barrel is a hint of what might lie ahead if unrest spreads from North Africa to the major oil-producing countries in the Middle East Libya is not a particularly important oil producer. Ranked 19th in the world and accounting for about 2pc of global output, its production is quite easily replaceable. Saudi Arabia could fill the gap twice over with its existing spare capacity. The real concern, however, is contagion. Saudi Arabia itself is not immune, evidenced by the financial support measures worth $36bn announced last week So far, investment markets appear to be dismissing the possibility that we are facing another 1970s-style oil price shock. In the context of the significant rise in markets since last summer, the pull-back last week was unexceptional. But the speed with which the oil price spiked shows how pull-back last week was unexceptional. But the speed with which the oil price spiked shows how quickly the backdrop might become less benign.

Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers. In its article about the Justice Department’s decision, The Los Angeles Times said prosecutors had concluded that Mr. Mozilo’s actions “did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.” the financial crisis either. Mr. Cassano, you’ll recall, is the former head of the financial products unit of the American International Group, a man whose enthusiasm for credit-default swaps led, pretty directly, to the need for a huge government bailout of A.I.G. There was a time when it appeared that there was no way the government would let Mr. Cassano walk. But it did. And then there’s Richard Fuld, the man who presided over Lehman Brothers’ demise. Though he was the subject of an investigation shortly after the Lehman bankruptcy, it appears that prosecutors are moving on Most of the other Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks — risks that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees — aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen. Nor has brought the global financial system to its knees — aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen. Nor has there been a single indictment against any top executive at a subprime lender.

A police station and a government building were on fire on Sunday in the Omani town of Sohar after police clashed with more than 2,000 protesters demanding reforms in the Gulf Arab state, a Reuters witness said. (Writing by Cynthia Johnston)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

There's been virtually no reliable information coming out of Tripoli, but a source close to the Gaddafi regime I did manage to get hold of told me the already terrible situation in Libya will get much worse. Among other things, Gaddafi has ordered security services to start sabotaging oil facilities. They will start by blowing up several oil pipelines, cutting off flow to Mediterranean ports. The sabotage, according to the insider, is meant to serve as a message to Libya's rebellious tribes: It's either me or chaos.

Two weeks ago this same man had told me the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt would never touch Libya. Gaddafi, he said, had a tight lock on all of the major tribes, the same ones that have kept him in power for the past 41 years. The man of course turned out to be wrong, and everything he now has to say about Gaddafi's intentions needs to be taken in that context. (See "The Rule of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi.")

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Is this one of those "who could have possibly seen it coming" moments? As events in Libya overnight spiralled out of control, with dozens if not hundreds killed, the parliament buildng in Tripoli on fire, and output at one of the country's oil fields reported to have been stopped by a workers' strike, BP has said it will soon begin evacuating some of its personnel from the 9th largest producer of oil. And just to complete the total chaos, Iran warships are now going to pass the Suez on Tuesday instead of today, to the full glory of a fully open US stock market. The result: gold over $1,400; silver over $33.50; Crude front month over $93; Brent over $105; etc. Luckily, the US stock market is closed, meaning all this will be "priced in" by tomorrow, and the HFT levitation can resume tomorrow as if today never happened...

It's a matter of picking which middle eastern dictatorship falls next now... this means that the price of oil is set to skyrocket, any global recovery will be stopped in it's tracks and Israel may be tempted to launch preemptive strikes

The faltering government of the Libyan strongman, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, struck back at mounting protests against his 40-year rule as security forces and militiamen backed by helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the capital on Monday, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli.

By Monday night, witnesses said, the streets of Tripoli were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi as well as mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as “small bombs” and helicopters fired on protesters.

Hundreds of Qaddafi supporters took over the central Green Square in the capital after truckloads of militiamen arrived and opened fire on protesters, scattering them. Residents said they now feared even emerging from their houses.

“It was an obscene amount of gunfire,” said one witness. “They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.”

Monday, February 21, 2011

A good smile gives you self-confidence. However, what do you do when your teeth are not as white as you might wish? Teeth whitening is a very common operation nowadays and there are many procedures that help us get a great smile. With such results, going to a dentist becomes a pleasure.

Teeth whitening is a procedure that lightens teeth and removes stains and discoloration. The whitening of teeth is a cosmetic dentistry formula recommended for patients with healthy, un-restored teeth and strong gums. People with yellow tones to their teeth respond best.Read the full article here

Saturday, February 19, 2011

By Wednesday night, the machine appeared to be heading for an overwhelming victory against two human contestants who had scored the best results in the 27-year history of the middle-brow, question-and-answer series.

This may sound a bit of an anti-climax compared to the last time the US computer giant pitted its machines against raw human brainpower. Fourteen years ago, IBM’s purpose-built Deep Blue machine edged past world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match by two games to one, with three draws.

But in fact the move from the pure mathematics realm of chess to the less orderly world of language and popular culture represents a big leap for computing – and one that could have an impact surprisingly quickly on both everyday life and business competitiveness.

The history of artificial intelligence is full of false dawns. Attempts to build machines capable of emulating human thought seem only to prove that the subtlety of the human mind cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Yet with advances such as the quiz show-playing system, big steps are being made in techniques closely linked to machine intelligence.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Hong Kong lay bare China's growing influence as America's largest creditor.

As the U.S. Federal Reserve grappled with the aftershocks of financial crisis, the Chinese, like many others, suffered huge losses from their investments in American financial firms — from Lehman Brothers to the Primary Reserve Fund, the money market fund that broke the buck.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, show that escalating Chinese pressure prompted a procession of soothing visits from the U.S. Treasury Department.

In one striking instance, a top Chinese money manager directly asked U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for a favor.

In June, 2009, the head of China's powerful sovereign wealth fund met with Geithner and requested that he lean on regulators at the U.S. Federal Reserve to speed up the approval of its $1.2 billion investment in Morgan Stanley [MS30.820.13(+0.42%)], according to the cables, which were provided to Reuters by a third party.

Although the cables do not mention if Geithner took any action, China's deal to buy Morgan Stanley shares was announced the very next day.

The two Treasury officials to whom the cables were addressed, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia Robert Dohner and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Monetary and Financial Policy Mark Sobel, declined through a spokesperson to comment for this story.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

A huge opportunity to hedge against both inflation and deflation is lying out there in the open. There are no transaction costs and right now there’s even a built-in discount. But most people will never realize any of this.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

I can predict when SA’s "Tunisia Day" will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China estimates that its current minerals-intensive industrialisation phase will be concluded.

For SA, this will mean the African National Congress (ANC) government will have to cut back on social grants, which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China’s current industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of SA’s minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes.

The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkerings with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail. The ANC leaders are like a group of children playing with a hand grenade. One day one of them will figure out how to pull out the pin and everyone will be killed.

A famous African liberation movement, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, after tinkering for 30 years, pulled the grenade pin by cancelling an election in 1991 that was won by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front. In the civil war that ensued, 200000 people were killed.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

If you want to understand why our power to influence world events is a shambles, you need only to listen to what came out of the White House, the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence this week in response to the crisis in Egypt. Start with a point so basic that even liberals should agree with it: if you lack timely, accurate and expertly-analyzed intelligence on other peoples and nations, the making of foreign policy is reduced to mere guesswork. American policymakers have --roughly since Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Stansfield Turner, decided that we really don't need spies --been reduced to guessing what the world is doing.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has called for a new world currency that would challenge the dominance of the dollar and protect against future financial instability.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Meredith Whitney, the Wall Street analyst who shot to fame predicting Citigroup's demise, was the talk of Congress on Thursday. Or at least a corner of it. And then only because she was no where to be seen. Ms Whitney had been invited to testify before a committee of lawmakers examining the health of America's $2.86 trillion (£1.8 trillion) municipal bond market. It's one of the less glamorous parts of the debt universe, covering the borrowings of the country's towns, cities and other local authorities that exist below state level. The House of Representatives Oversight and Government reform sub-committee had asked Ms Whitney to attend because she has been the talk of the market this year. The 41-year old, who cited a clash of schedules in declining the invitation, caused waves in the market after using a high-profile television interview late last year to warn that a flood of defaults was on its way.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Capitalism without losers. Just how damaging is a world without losers? Yesterday’s consumer credit data made it pretty clear that the consumer is starting to re-leverage. This is extremely positive for economic growth in the near-term, however, it is alarming in the long-term. Consumers haven’t actually straightened out their balance sheets, but why should they? No one loses in this market. There are no repercussions for excessive debt and out of control spending. So the lesson to consumers is obvious – you don’t need to be prudent. You don’t need to save. You need to borrow. You need to leverage yourself up. After all, you are American. You have a right to own an Ipad, a flat screen TV, a luxury automobile, a McMansion and all of the other things that are not privileges, but our rights as Americans. And we know this is true because it is what the government promotes via their endless “no losers” capitalism policy.

This government’s policies are directly tied around the idea of getting credit going again. After all, it is the core of the theories that have driven economic policy for decades now. For the last 30 years we have focused on building a banking behemoth that specializes in bankrupting its clientele. We have de-regulated the banking sector to the point where they have a virtual monopoly on the US economy and without them we think we can no longer survive. We are so dependent on credit growth that we have all mortgaged our futures away just to keep this economy afloat and the music playing for one more decade.

We reward those who buy homes when they are overvalued. We encourage speculation in markets when the fundamentals aren’t there to support them. We pay people for sitting at home and doing nothing. We bailout companies that made bad bets. We reward people for buying cars they can’t afford. And worst of all, we don’t even prosecute the people who helped cause the recent credit crisis. Oh, capitalism without losers.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Relaxing near the entrance to a blood-stained alley off Cairo’s central Tahrir Square, prominent engineer and political activist Mamdouh Hamza, 63, credits the Muslim Brotherhood with saving the day. “We needed them,” he says. “They were very important to the resistance.” A short distance down the alley, amid a warren of shuttered shops, is the makeshift hospital that treated the hundreds of anti-regime protesters who were bludgeoned, stabbed, shot, burned by Molotov cocktails, or hit by flying rocks during last week’s pitched battle against President Hosni Mubarak’s men. But the protesters managed to hold their ground—thanks to the Brotherhood’s reinforcements, Hamza says, scanning the crowd in the square. “Half the people here, or maybe 40 percent, are Muslim Brotherhood,” he says. “They were a very important factor.”

The big question now is this: how much more important a factor will they become? The Brotherhood’s hardline Islamist roots frighten a lot of people, both outside Egypt and in. Addressing Israel’s Knesset last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the specter of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought the ayatollahs to power and transformed a staunch ally of Israel into one of its most implacable and dangerous enemies. Members of the U.S. Congress expressed similar fears. And so, of course, did Mubarak, who has presented himself as Egypt’s last line of defense against a radical Islamist deluge ever since the October 1981 assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, by followers of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group. He told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour last week that although he’s fed up with ruling, he can’t abandon his post now or “chaos” would come.

There on page 63 of the report, delivered in the former Citigroup chairman’s inimitable style, we learn what went so horribly wrong at Lehman Brothers, AIG and Merrill Lynch – and, of course, Mr Weill’s beloved Citigroup.

“If you look at the results of what happened on Wall Street, it became, ‘well, this one’s doing it, so how can I not do it, if I don’t do it, then people are going to leave my place and go some place else’,” said Mr Weill, who built Citi into the world’s largest financial-services company only to watch from retirement as the government rescued his former empire. Managing risk “became less of an important function in a broad base of companies”. The crisis exposed flaws in the way Wall Street measures and limits risk. As in past disasters, the industry and its regulators emerged from the downturn with reforms to empower risk managers and invest in systems to avoid future catastrophes.

These are well-meaning, overdue changes. But will they ensure any bank’s safe passage beyond the next crisis? Absolutely not. Sooner or later, Wall Street’s top executives will face the dilemma faced by Mr Weill. They will feel the same pressure, from shareholders, employees and even board members that they or their predecessors endured as the financial world descended into crisis. Banks have added hundreds of risk managers, who now have more equal standing with their revenue-producing peers, both in pay and responsibilities. In some cases, top risk officers report directly to the chief executive. Risk systems have been improved, with more stringent stress-testing embraced. Corporate boards have introduced risk committees. New capital requirements will make it more costly to hold riskier assets. Regulators will impose rules forcing banks to pay a bigger portion of employees’ bonuses over time, ensuring money can be “clawed back” for poor performance.

Tense and terrible times inevitably summon an odd coupling of two very different and difficult human conditions; honesty, and brutality. Certain painful truths are revealed, and often, a palpable fury erupts. Being that times today are particularly tense, and on the verge of being spectacularly terrible, perhaps we should embrace both conditions in a constructive manner, and become brutally honest with ourselves. This begins by admitting to that which most ails us. It begins by admitting how far we have fallen…

Our economy, our culture, our entire world, is built upon debt. No one ever asked us if that’s how we wanted it, it is simply how the system was designed when we came into it. Many of us have lived our entire lives under the assumption that debt is a necessary function of daily commerce and a valuable driver of successful society. Most households in America operate at a steep loss, trapped in constantly building cycles of liability and interest. There are even widely held schools of economic thought that are centered completely on the production and utilization of nothing but debt. Only recently have many people begun to ask themselves what the tangible benefits are (if any) in being dependent on debt based finance.

After careful examination, it becomes evident that debt does not fuel economy, it suffocates it. It does not nurture growth, it stunts and poisons it. Extreme debt is not a fundamental organ in a body of commerce; it is an aberration, a spreading cancer which disrupts the circulation of healthy trade. Debt is, in large part, unnecessary.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

No country finds itself at greater unease with the developments in Egypt than Israel, and for good reason.

It isn't that Israel opposes the genuine democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people. If a new government in a post-Mubarak Egypt clearly stated it planned to maintain peaceful relations with the Jewish State, there would be no problem. But when Israel purportedlygave its blessingfor the Egyptian military to mobilize in Sinai, you know it's very worried. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahucalledthese developments a "tremendous threat."

Let us not forget that there was a time not so long ago when Egypt was Israel's arch enemy. In Israel's first quarter century as a state it fought four wars with Egypt. The sight of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shaking hands along with Jimmy Carter was surely as inconceivable as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Egypt would be expelled from the Arab League for its rapprochement with Israel and Sadat would pay for peace with his life. Who in 1978 could have imagined that Israel and Egypt would be at peace with each other longer than they had been adversaries?

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Out of a week of chaos in Egypt comes the bloodiest day yet. Early Thursday morning, the military and anti-Mubarak protesters clashed while small groups of people opened fire on others. The causality toll is quickly rising, as news stations show live streaming video of people being literally lit on fire and others being lynched in front of the camera. Just as chilling is the fact that hundreds if not thousands of anti-Mubarak protesters have been screaming for "jihad" as they beat other Egyptians, possibly to death. http://punditpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/anti-mubarak-protesters-scream-for.html

At first glance, the upheaval on the Nile might seem far removed from the world of Wall Street and Main Street. Egypt is not a major participant in global manufacturing networks, nor is Cairo a significant financial hub. But Egypt's political crisis could have implications for the global economy nevertheless. That's because the economic and political role Egypt plays in the Middle East gives it economic power beyond the easy-to-measure statistics. The turmoil in Egypt is putting a glaring spotlight on the fragility of political stability in the entire Arab world. That, in turn, is giving already-nervous investors yet another reason to worry about the questionable strength of the global recovery. http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/02/02/does-the-turmoil-in-egypt-...

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

An Egyptian political activist, a Bush-appointed diplomat, and Obama campaign staffers met in New York in 2008 to talk about revolution—of the social-media kind. And now the Internet is buzzing.

In December 2008, a prominent Egyptian opposition activist walked through the crowded airport in Cairo. When packing, he had been careful not to leave any evidence of where he was going among his belongings, and in the departure hall, he walked up to a security desk and told the guard to search him. “I am on your watch list,” he said. “So please get this over with so I don’t miss my plane.”

He didn’t.

Three days later, the Egyptian sat in a room on the campus of Columbia’s Law School in Upper Manhattan, listening to presentations from three key staffers from Barack Obama’s social-media team: Joe Rospars, Scott Goodstein, and Sam Graham-Felsen. Given that the three had just helped the first black man get elected U.S. president, there was a buzz in the air. After all, the three staffers represented the revolutionary potential of new social-media tools, and, as Graham-Felsen puts it now, their speeches revolved around how to give “ordinary people the power to connect.”

Egypt is ablaze. Hundreds of thousands protested in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Tuesday, but for fear of an Islamist regime the US now risks being remembered as a democracy that abandons democrats. After generations in opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood now wants to play a part in Egypt’s future, giving a rare chance to strike a deal for their compromises and democratic involvement.

To this day we are paying the price for ignoring ordinary Iranians and siding with the Shah in 1979. Then, secular democrats triggered a revolution only to be brushed aside by fundamentalists. Today, ordinary Egyptians lead demonstrations but the Brotherhood waits in the background; an indispensable force in national life.

With a network running through trade unions, mosques, businesses and universities, the organisation is hugely influential. Opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei has already formed a loose alliance, and for sound reasons. Last September, of the million signatures petitioning for change under Mr ElBaradei’s leadership, the Brotherhood collected 800,000

We first introduced Google Latitude to help you stay in touch with your friends and family by making it easy to share where you are. For the 10 million people actively using Latitude each month, this “where” has been a location on a map. Starting today in Google Maps 5.1 for Android, you can also connect that location to a real place by checking in there using Latitude.